History Returns to Charleston

The Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a day after Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine congregants following a Bible study.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE/GETTY

We don’t know much about Dylann Storm Roof, but one of the questions we will want answered is just how calculated his actions were on Wednesday, June 17th, when he entered the famous Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Calhoun Street, sat for an hour of Bible study, and then murdered nine members of the congregation.

Did Roof know that slaughtering blacks in churches is an established horror in Southern history? Did he know that the very founding of black churches was one of the first steps forward in slave liberation? Or that the A.M.E. Church into which he walked is considered by many to have been co-founded by Denmark Vesey, the legendary leader credited with planning what might have been the largest slave rebellion in Southern history, had he not been found out beforehand and hung? Did Roof know that Vesey’s rebellion was foiled on June 17, 1822? He lived some two hours from Charleston and yet showed up at that church, on that day. Can all that be coincidence?

I grew up two blocks from Emanuel A.M.E. Church. As a white kid, I remember that the story of Vesey was always fraught, largely because white people told the story as a revenge nightmare: Vesey’s plan was to kill all of Charleston’s white residents, then set the city on fire and sail for Haiti. There’s some historical evidence, though, that the story was propaganda intended to ignite white rage, which it still does today. In fact, there is a school of thought that believes there might not have been a well-developed conspiracy at all, and that Vesey, who had bought his own freedom after winning the lottery and was despised by whites in Charleston, was framed. In a small book called “The Making of a Slave Conspiracy,” Michael P. Johnson, a historian at Johns Hopkins, argues that there are, at least, good reasons to doubt the accepted narrative. Johnson puts forth an alternative scenario in which a power struggle between two Charlestonian politicians led one to sow the rumor of a widespread rebellion involving the other’s slaves as way to damage his reputation.

Buying into Johnson’s argument doesn’t diminish Vesey’s legacy, it just shifts its focus. His greatest contribution to African-American history may actually be his role in founding the Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Emanuel was where slaves could congregate, talk, and learn—where they began the move toward emancipation. Whether or not Vesey planned a rebellion there, the church was seen as a threat in Charleston. Vesey was killed in 1822, and Emanuel was burned to the ground soon afterwards. In 1834, black churches were outlawed in South Carolina. In 1865, Vesey’s son Robert designed a new church, which stood until 1886, when it collapsed in an earthquake. The current building dates to 1891.

After I finished high school in Charleston, in the nineteen-seventies, an attempt by the newly elected mayor, Joe Riley, to honor Vesey resulted in a portrait painted by Dorothy Wright. It was to hang in the entrance foyer of the Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, more or less across the street from Vesey’s church. Since no one knows what Vesey looked like, Wright painted him from behind, speaking to a congregation. When the painting was mounted, in 1976, many people I knew ridiculed it: What kind of portrait of a man shows only the back of his head? Not long afterward, it was ripped from the wall and disappeared, only to return after Riley said he would have a duplicate painted. It was restored to its position in the auditorium, firmly bolted to the wall.

In 1996, the Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture, along with others, sought to erect a statue of Vesey in Charleston. They wanted to install it on Marion Square, half a block from Emanuel A.M.E., where a statue of a brooding John C. Calhoun stands atop a two-story-tall pedestal.

An armory and a fort built beside Marion Square to prevent future rebellions by blacks still stands directly at Calhoun’s back. The military academy founded there would eventually become the school known as the Citadel. The plan was to have Denmark Vesey stand there on the green along with the fort and John C. Calhoun.

The park’s proprietors said no. So, when Vesey’s statue was finally unveiled, it was a mile or so up the peninsula, at Hampton Park. (According to the historian David Blight, Hampton Park was where Memorial Day originated, when, after the Civil War, freed slaves gathered to honor the Union dead.)

The Charleston of aristocrats (or “bourbons,” as they used to say), with its beautiful downtown architecture and carriage horses, and, lately, hip restaurants and thriving music scene, has always enjoyed a sheltered reputation, built in part on the assumption that the inland part of South Carolina, the piedmont, was where such violence and brutality occurred. (The only Unionist in South Carolina’s secession debate was a Charleston legislator named James Petigru.) Charleston calls itself the Holy City because it boasts Gothic Revival gems like Emanuel A.M.E. and also, a few blocks away, the comparably historic synagogue Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, and St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church. Then there’s Circular Congregational and, dominating a two-block stretch, St. Michael’s Episcopal, First Scots Presbyterian, and First Baptist. Charleston’s ecumenical tradition dates way back: Muslim immigrants arrived in town at the end of the eighteenth century, and Charleston’s founding father, Charles Pinckney, granted these newest residents full rights, with the approval of the 1790 Moors Sundry Act. (Pinckney is also credited with inserting the “no religious test” clause into the Constitution.) From time to time, these houses of worship have pulled together, and no doubt they will again, in grief.

But then there is history, and in South Carolina that has always been complicated. The morning after the massacre, on the order of Governor Nikki Haley, the federal and state flags atop the Capitol’s dome were lowered to half-mast. In front of the capitol steps, on the statehouse grounds, the battle flag of the Confederacy flew high. It had been moved there from the dome after a lengthy fight in 2000. Under the law passed then, this Confederate flag cannot be lowered, even by the governor, but only by “a joint resolution by a two-thirds vote of the membership of each house of the General Assembly.”